Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Clay vs. Liston 2012

Written by Jack Kelly

Monday, 23 April 2012

On Feb. 25, 1964, Cassius Clay shocked
the boxing world by defeating heavyweight champion Sonny Liston (9 days later,
he would announce he was a Black Moslem to be known as Muhammad Ali).Clay used his superior quickness to evade
Liston's ponderous punches, and counterpunched so effectively that Liston
didn't answer the bell for the 7th round.

The opening rounds of the general
election campaign have resembled the Clay-Liston fight.Mitt Romney has counterpunched so effectively
Democrats were lying bleeding on the canvas before they knew what hit them.
Within hours after Democrat operative
Hilary Rosen said on CNN that Mr. Romney's wife, Ann, a mother of five,
"actually never worked a day in her life," Democrats were running from her like
scalded dogs.

On a vacation trip in 1983, Seamus, the
Romney family dog, rode in a crate on top of their station wagon.Democrats hyped this as evidence of Mr.
Romney's "insensitivity." As a boy in
Indonesia, Barack Hussein Obama ate dog, he said in his autobiography.The Romney team pounced.

"One tweet from an iPad, and the Romney
campaign had knocked back five years of dog stories," wrote Dave
Weigel of Slate with grudging admiration.

Twice in as many weeks, the
Romney team turned Democrat attacks against them.I expect this to happen again and again. The Dems will telegraph their punches, the
Romney campaign will counterpunch.

Panicked, the Dems will swing more wildly,
more often, exposing themselves, and will hit the canvas again and again.
And as they lie there, Romney will say the election should be about
issues, not about nonsense like this.

With no achievements to tout, Democrats
feel they must run down the other guys.A CBS/New York Times poll last week indicated 42 percent of Americans
like Mr. Obama personally, but only 29 percent like Mitt Romney, so Democrats
think personal attacks on Mr. Romney will work.

But when a president seeks a second
term, the election is a referendum on his performance in office.The president's percentage of the popular
vote tracks closely with his job approval, noted psephologist Sean Trende.

Americans give Mr. Obama such low marks
on job performance that Washington Post political analyst Ed
Rogers thinks "a serious challenge for the Romney campaign will be how to
stay out of the way while Obama loses."

The president's numbers will improve if
the economy does, but it is getting weaker.So Democrats double down on personal attacks. Their strategy is doomed.Here are four reasons why:

*Mr. Romney's low personal approval
rating is chiefly the residual effect of a nasty primary campaign.It will dissipate as Republicans consolidate
around their nominee.

*Mr. Obama's rating will drop.Personal approval and job approval tend to
converge, because if you don't like what a president is doing, you tend not to
like him much, either. And instead of
attacking Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich, Mr. Romney will run ads criticizing
the president.

*Mr. Obama's campaign strategy will
accelerate the drop.In Michigan
Wednesday (4/18), he said: "Unlike some people, I wasn't born with a silver
spoon in my mouth." This strikes
Americans as more petulant than presidential.

*The more the president talks about Mr.
Romney, and the less he talks about the issues which concern Americans, the
more he seems out of touch, in over his head.

But Democrats are so accustomed to
turning every issue into a personal attack they can't stop, even when its
counterproductive.To mix sports
metaphors, Democrats are like a football team that runs the same play over and
over, without regard to down and distance.

Early indications are a strategy of
distract-and-smear won't work against Mitt Romney.He counterpunches fast and hard, and then
returns swiftly to the issues Americans care about.

Because he knows Americans don't have to
like him to vote for him, or dislike President Obama to vote against him, Mr.
Romney focuses like a laser on competence.He uses effectively the contrast between Mr. Obama's words in 2008 and
his subsequent deeds to make his points.
He doesn't call the president names.He acts like the grownup in the race.

Even in polls which oversample
Democrats, Mr. Romney already runs even with the president.The whopping 10 point advantage the GOP
enjoyed last Monday (4/16) in Rasmussen's
generic Congressional poll indicates Republicans are more popular (or Democrats
less popular) now than on the eve of the Republican landslide in 2010.

When Democrats such as Carter
and Clinton -- or for that matter, Zero in 2008 -- have won in the past, they
did so by being hypocritical, by paying fealty to "family values"
they didn't really embrace. But this time Zero is runnng hard left on
social issues, which a Democrat hasn't done since George McGovern.

Romney, however, can
capitalize on family values just because he has lived them. Zero will
make social issues an issue, and his extremism on them will drive centrist
voters toward Romney without him having to make an overt pitch.